The Marketing Leap wants to bring Toronto and Waterloo’s best marketers together

As Canada’s startup scene matures, the need for great marketers – and marketing tech – has never been greater. Marko Savic, co-founder and CEO of FunnelCake, found himself fielding questions about marketing tech and saw opportunity to bring marketers together.

Marketers are facing a variety of challenges today – especially when it comes to tools.

“We’ve built a pretty great network of marketers in Waterloo and Toronto while starting FunnelCake. They were all interested in hearing each other’s stories,” says Marko. “We started planning a user group and realized it’s a pretty world-class speaker lineup. We floated the idea of turning this into a conference with Communitech and it came together pretty quickly.”

The Marketing Leap is a one-day conference on February 29th, 2016 at the Tannery Event Centre in Kitchener, Ontario. The day is focused on learning how the best marketers run their teams. “February 29th was the only day that the venue was free, and being a leap day we couldn’t resist turning that into the branding,” says Marko. Christina Ellwood, former VP of Marketing at Brickstream will be opening the day with a keynote on the state of modern marketing. Other notable speakers include April Dunford from Sprint.ly, Cam Davies from Miovision, and Larysa Wood from Igloo Software.

Marketers are facing a variety of challenges today – especially when it comes to tools. Teams are using different tools for social management, content creation, automation, ads, CRM, and video. “It creates a few problems,” says Marko. “You need more tactical specialists on your team, who really understand both the tools and the channels, your VP needs to understand how all these things work together to form a strategy, and you need a way to report the effectiveness of each tactic in a way that’s connected to revenue.”

While Waterloo is known for its pool of developer talent and the co-op program at the University of Waterloo, the city is quickly gaining notice for its marketing and sales talent. “Shopify is building their whole sales ecosystem here, they’re plucking kids right out of school and training the next generation of sales talent. There’s a big push to make it part of the culture with things like Communitech’s Rev program. There’s so much pent-up demand for marketing that it’s made putting The Marketing Leap together fairly easy” says Marko. FunnelCake is in the current cohort in Communitech Rev.

“We hope people will take away two things,” says Marko, “an abundance of knowledge that will improve how they plan and execute on marketing strategy through 2016 and to better understand that there is a huge and talented community of marketers in Toronto-Waterloo.”

The Marketing Leap is Monday, February 29th, 2016. Early bird registration is open now for $179.00 + tax.

Alex Kinsella is a contributor to BetaKit. He's worked for tech companies of every stage in customer service, consulting, development, product management, PR and social media roles. He's currently the Digital Marketing Manager at Communitech in Waterloo Region, Ontario.